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Feels like we're getting very close to a release of iOS 9.3, tvOS 9.2 and watchOS 2.2 with all of the betas getting their 5th trip out into the world this week. One notable feature in this beta is that playgrounds are now able to have embedded videos which rounds out a fantastic set of enhancements to them. Xcode has also had a whole set of other enhancements through this beta cycle and along with the updated SDKs and Swift 2.2, this is going to be a great release.

News

I touched on some of the problems with app review last week, but Graham Spencer published a much more comprehensive article a few days ago. Apparently the number one complaint was the speed of review, which I'm a little surprised about as it's been quite stable for a long time now and there's no sign of the huge spikes and delays of a few years ago. There's much to discuss here, but he does finish off with some of the positive aspects of the process just in case you were thinking it's all bad!

I can't believe it's only a few months until we'll all be making our annual pilgrimage to San Francisco for WWDC. What should we expect? Well, Steven Troughton-Smith has been giving it some deep thought and has come up with an amazing set of (ambitious!) suggestions. I did have to raise a smile when halfway down the article, I saw "Now that the easy stuff is out of the way". You have to have lofty goals right? 😄

Sponsored Link

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Tools

Ever struggled to find the correct sequence of characters to get your dates formatted just as you need them? Ben Scheirman has put together this fantastic tool for quickly previewing the results of a date formatter based on an input date and a format string.

Another build tool from Facebook this week with the introduction of xcbuild. You might be asking what this tool has over xctool, also from Facebook and also able to build. Well, it looks like they are re-focusing xctool on the testing process, and introducing xcbuild for everything build related. Sounds good to me.

Code

Storehouse is still one of the most beautiful apps on the App Store when it comes to animations and this week they have open sourced their animation engine. Built on top of CADisplayLink, they recommend this mainly if you're looking to do physics based animations that interact with gestures.

Great little library from Christian Menschel which lets you easily keep track of your app's frame rate while in development. It colours the status bar and gives you an FPS counter so you can always be aware of when you're dropping below 60 FPS.

Assertions, preconditions, preconditionFailures and fatalErrors. Swift brought with it much finer grained control of how you handle your assumptions. Even if you think you know everything about them though, Mike Ash digs deeper than you probably will have done so you should still give it a read.